Argot
by flecksofpoppy
Summary: The context and content of words, and what they convey, is a tricky thing. My first fic that really addresses the plate drop. Dark. Reno/Rude.


This has been pickling in my brain and sitting on my hard drive (in various evolving forms) for the better part of a month...maybe more. This fic _started_ as some dirty talk kink deal, and then morphed into something else. It's kinda dark.

This is my Reno plate drop fic, a topic I've been grappling with forever. So this is some version of how I think it might go down (uh, no pun intended). Like I said...a tad bit dark. Maybe more than a tad. This is dysfunction junction, but the damn thing is _done_ (I think), so...yeah. I'm quaking in my boots a little over this one, but whatever. Okay, here we go... 

* * *

><p><strong>Argot<strong>

**1.**

Words made the universe through chaos. That's what every religious dictum had ever decreed, and the only time it bothered Rude was when street preachers would shout the same, like a soliloquy that belonged in a play and not in the Midgar city avenues where he did his killing.

He enjoyed taking down a soapbox preacher more than anything else. Sometimes President Shinra got restless, and he'd send his blue suits galloping after the nearest target who was letting loose screams of indignation so loud that the rooftops shook, convinced that it led to a haze of AVALANCHE terrorist activities. _Shinra, the antichrist. Shinra, the great usurper of the Lifestream._

The President was paranoid by then. He was going to die soon, and Rude knew it. Not by whom, not when, not how...but death was hovering over the fat blond man sitting in those tenuous heavens, lit up green in light powered by Mako, the color of gangrene. And Rude knew better than anyone what corpses fizzling away in Mako looked like.

No one knew what "Lifestream" _really_ meant back in those days, and Rude had silenced those shouts as simple as a bullet to the temple. His gun couldn't solve everything, but it solved things for at least a few minutes. And it was his job.

Rude didn't like to talk; would rather let his gun and his fists do the talking for him, would rather let the words come in the form of fingers skidding over flesh and into eye sockets. Words coming in bruises against hips, male or female, strange and sharp and unfamiliar, and cries that withered as soon as they were spent with his slackening cock. Occasionally he forgot whether those sounds were brought about by torture or by orgasm, and that was what scared him most of all.

But sometimes, people liked to talk. People liked to talk a lot, and dignity be damned, he liked to listen.

He had been right in the the middle of frantically yanking Reno's hips back against him in hard, repetitive motions as he buried his cock when, _"Tell me why you want me to fuck you,"_ fell in a low rumble of words. It wasn't silenced, it wasn't bloody. It was wet, it was hot, it was alive; it was his partner, giving as good as he got.

Reno didn't miss a beat - just turned his head from where he was balanced on his hands and knees, still shoving his hips back, looked at Rude with a knowing smirk, and replied: "_Because your cock feels good up my ass."_

He'd make Reno describe in great detail _why_ that statement was true, and he'd thrust into him harder and harder until both of them came, almost solely from the words that poured from Reno's mouth and quickly broke down into cries and broken syllables and hoarse, heavy breath.

There were times, when Reno was on his lap straddling him, driven into a frenzy of need and words, his cock sliding in and out of that tight heat, that Rude realized fucking his partner was one of the best things that had ever happened to him.

Reno was one of the most unhinged human beings that he had ever met. But Rude liked to probe around people, figure them out, observe their motives and internal gears until he could surmise what to expect. He was good at it too - he had done it with Reno, and although he had figured out his assigned partner pretty quickly, Reno had figured him out too.

"Well," he had said, almost two years into the job, flipping his electromag rod off and flicking a cigarette butt onto the corpse lying at their feet, "if you're gonna stare at me all day, fucking do something about it."

It was a matter of years before Rude actually did.

Later on, he had wondered if Reno remembered that brief conversation, but he had a feeling that he did. Reno rarely forgot anything. He was good with details, just like Rude, only not as cautious. Reno let his mouth get them into all kinds of trouble.

And Rude was fascinated by Reno's mouth. It filled up entire days with words and curses formed around cigarettes and slurred declarations of love for him through the bottom of whiskey glasses. None of it serious, none of it memorable, but so much there, filling everything. Reno could fill up a room with his presence unlike anyone Rude had ever known.

Until one day he seized the opportunity to shut Reno up...and shut him up he did. He may have been the only one capable.

"Rude, did you get dumped or something?" Reno had asked. Then a long drag from his cigarette. Outside. Cold. "You look like shit... no offense, partner. Just a little friendly concern here."

"No," an innocuous response. Rude, looking off somewhere into the sky. They had been on the upper plate that night.

Rude's eyes on Reno, watching the cigarette's orange tip glow and burn. Then: "You still want me to fucking do something about it?"

Skeptical look; smoke inhaled, smoke exhaled. No answer.

Rude's silent, unshakable stare. Serious. Waiting.

"Do you want me to fuck you?"

Skeptical look melting into something unfamiliar. Cigarette drowned in snow. Bodies against each other. And Reno, quiet.

"Answer the question."

Hands everywhere. Not afraid, just expectant and demanding, knowing the answer now, and Rude taking great pleasure in making him say it.

Reno, grudgingly: "Yes."

"Yes what?" Hands stilled; heat rushing crazily through a body that had opened with want.

A quiet, "Yeah..." Then, forced out, "I want you to fuck to me."

**2.**

He fucked him, then continued to fuck him until he wasn't fucking anyone else. Rude didn't know if there was anyone besides him on Reno's side, but he didn't think about it too much. Tried not to, anyway. Regardless, with Reno, he could expend time and words and energy, over and over, until they were both so tired that sometimes Rude found himself waking up with another body in his bed - not something to which he was accustomed, but also not unwelcome.

Rude grew quite fond of Reno's mouth, but especially his voice. The clear difference between a smirk and a bite, a joke and a moan, a killing scream and a coming scream.

The hardest thing for Reno to say at first was Rude's name, even after all of the "your cock-this" and "your cock-that" and "Is my ass tight enough for you?" that Reno could spit out.

Fear was not in Reno's vocabulary. Moderation, not so much either. He wasn't callous, and he understood risks, but even then, he wouldn't hesitate to charge into a situation, weapons blazing, mouth yammering a mile a minute, making threats (though, to his credit, only ones that he could keep) and declaring their inevitable victory. He simply wasn't afraid to die.

So when Rude first noticed that his name was absent from the ever prurient, detailed novelization of sex that Reno had very quickly stepped up to provide, he wondered. He wondered if there was fear, somewhere, lingering there between them.

He made him say it, eventually.

They had been delirious, with Reno's arms twisted behind his back, seated on Rude's lap and facing away from him with his legs spread wide, the two of them joined too closely at that moment to part without going completely insane. They were almost to the point when sweat starts to stick, when Rude had said, "Say my name."

The tension in Reno's body had risen like smoke, a thick eye-watering cloud that gathered in the circle of Rude's arms. He could feel it collecting in Reno's shoulders, the way they bunched immediately, as though he planned to drag himself upward, away from Rude, away from the words, away from his own mouth that was babbling incoherently at that point since he was about to come, and just float away and dissipate. But he couldn't, because he was made of flesh, and Rude was  
>strong.<p>

"Damn it," he had muttered, but didn't say anything else. The tension stayed, and Rude bit at his shoulder, slowing his movements as he thrust into Reno's body.

"Say it," he repeated. Slow and deep, the way he knew Reno didn't like it, but good.

"Fuck you," he had growled, trying to get Rude to speed back up, leaning away. He bucked his hips, and Rude could feel the desperation. He controlled their pace easily, leaning forward to follow Reno and bite him again.

"Reno," he had uttered simply. Then lifted him up bodily and slammed him back down onto his cock, getting a satisfying cry out of the other man.

"Fuck you, Rude," the words sounded like he could barely breathe as he said them, but once he did, it was like a dam breaking. "Shit. _Rude_... fuck _me_..."

He thrust into him hard, more quickly, and hearing his own name out of Reno's mouth made him come; Reno followed a few seconds later.

After that, the words came freely. Reno began to confess things like a parishioner in a priest's darkened box. He told Rude things through the mesh of the dark, through sex, his voice hushed but never whimpering, never guilty. He just told him - what he had done, things he had done when Rude had been present, whispering the details as if he knew somewhere, deep in his gut, that they were sin. And Rude had simply laid next to him and listened; sometimes fucking, sometimes just holding on, sometimes not touching at all, just laid, and listened.

He was no priest, but he had probably heard more confessions than he could repeat or remember. And much like a priest, he told those confessors, _then pray to whatever you believe in_, before shooting their guts into the wall. In the stomach, if they were to suffer. In the head, if they were to receive salvation.

Reno never had the benefit of real judgment; damnation to hell was what they were expecting, waiting for. But Rude wasn't there to judge, so he stepped into the back room of Reno's mind like a prisoner being led to the death chamber. He did it willingly, and he always kept one hand on Reno's shoulder as they walked together.

**3.**

Reno had never bullshitted Rude when it mattered, and it had been like that from day one. So when he got back into the field - after the plate drop and the replacement and the injuries - there was something off.

Rude realized it was because Reno hadn't once talked about what had happened. Not even to him. If a Turk didn't want to talk about the past, specifically their "former life," it was a well-respected tradition that their co-workers politely step around it like refuse on a sidewalk.

But this was different. This was on the job. And Reno wasn't making any cracks about the tits on the female members of AVALANCHE, not gleefully proclaiming what a bad ass he was for surviving the collapse of an entire sector, doing nothing but smoking nervous cigarettes, and Rude could see the shake in his hands.

It seemed like there were cracks everywhere about Reno: the cigarettes that now broke when he gripped too hard; the creased leather of his boots that he had insisted on keeping even after the doctors had cut off all of his other clothing; the tense lines around his mouth that stretched too tight when he tried to grin through them.

After the plate, every night was just another night away from Midgar, another inn, another set of orders to execute in the seemingly never-ending chase for a ragtag band of insurgents that had managed to escape from the almighty clutches of Shinra. With every new town, every new continent, every new set of orders, Rude could feel things falling apart, felt it just as surely as the crease of well-traveled boot leather. And he knew that inevitably, with enough wear, it would split.

"We have to leave for Gongaga in eight hours," he said. It was nighttime and they were both tired.

Reno was sitting on the edge of the bed as he bent over to unlace his boots, the creak of loosening strings the only sound in the room as he pulled one off, kicked it to the side, and then started working on the other.

"Yup," Reno replied, not looking at him. Then silence, and not the easy kind. This was the Reno kind, stifling and heavy.

And finally Rude couldn't take it anymore. It seemed these days that they all had less and less to lose. But here and now, with he and Reno acting as the outstretched fingers of Shinra's iron fist, sent to quash a problem that was getting larger by the day, he had something to lose.

"What happened out there?" he finally asked. Reno stopped abruptly, fingers frozen in mid-action, but when he looked up his face betrayed nothing. He just smiled - his bullshit smile - and Rude could see the void.

"You know that, partner," he replied flatly. "Midgar's missing a slum. And I'm missing a few fragments of skull." He just shrugged and redirected his gaze downward as he pulled the other boot off and let it drop with a heavy thud.

Rude's silent stare, punctuated with a final, "Bullshit."

"And fuck you too." Lazy and quick, thrown out without any venom behind it. An easy response.

Then a conversation seemingly forgotten as Rude pushed Reno back against the mattress, the sharp sigh that emptied him of tension, the comfort of silence, Rude's hands, familiar and sure, pulling off Reno's clothes. Reno's closed eyes as Rude started to stroke him, a small sound in the back of his throat as he leaned into the touch and Rude stretched out on the bed next to him.

Then that voice again: "Tell me what happened." Words that tripped Reno up like stumbling face-first into a patch of nettles.

His eyes flew open as he sat bolt upright and shoved Rude's hand away. The anger was palpable and the tension had returned, nothing easy or lazy about him as his ribs expanded with deep, infuriated gasps of air.

"What the _fuck_?"

No answer as Rude just pushed him back down against the mattress where he had been. He didn't hold him there though, and waited for the tight fist whistling in rage to land on him. He had taken bruises from Reno for a long time, been prepared for them from the moment they had met.

"You sick piece of-" he spat.

The blow never came. Rude cut him off in mid-sentence as he pulled Reno against him, wrapped a strong arm around still-bruised ribs, catching his partner's body completely in his grip as if he were holding a seizuring, rabid animal. But Reno didn't fight; instead, he simply seemed to collapse into a spent pile of bones.

"What happened?" he asked again in a hushed voice, his hand resting on  
>Reno's hip now.<p>

Reno swiped a hand over his own face, then shook his head a little, as if he felt something scratching at him that he couldn't quite reach. He opened his mouth, then shut it, like a fish gasping for air.

The hand went back to his cock and started stroking again, and this time he didn't protest. Just took in a sharp breath, and moved his hips with the motion. A whine made itself out of his throat.

"Tell me about the plate," he said again, quietly, into Reno's ear.

The whine finally formed into something resembling syllables. His fists clenched and his shoulders twisted against Rude's chest sharply; a short curse, a breath, and finally, words.

"I..." it sounded like he was wheezing, the tension in his body radiating outwards, as if trying to escape from his own skin. "I can't stop watching, and hearing it..." His voice was brittle and ragged now.

He shoved his body back against Rude's in a half-hearted movement, a bitter cocktail of weak vitriol and desperation, but he was stopped like a battering ram hitting a solid oak door. Rude tightened his grip around Reno's body and kept stroking in slow, methodical movements. Then he cried out something that sounded like death rattling in his throat, and his entire body shivered as he gave short, hard thrusts into Rude's hand.

"What else?" Rude asked.

"The crash, sounded like..." He threw his head back against Rude's shoulder; the sound of bones grinding together was practically audible. Rude clutched him tighter and then thrust his own hips against Reno so that they were moving together, small, constrained motions that barely stirred the air.

"Tell me."

The words came quicker this time. "It sounded like...laughter."

Reno's hand flailed suddenly from where it had been balled into a tight fist, looking for something to hit, or strangle, or damage. Rude grabbed the hand and held it fast, let Reno wrap his death grip around his fingers.

"Stop asking me these fucking questions," he hissed, a bit of voice threaded through that was cracked and raw.

"No," Rude shot back, could feel his joints pleading with him to let go of Reno's hand that was questing for violence, bending his fingers back in an unnatural direction.

"Do you hear it right now?" he asked.

"Yes," Reno whispered, then moaned as Rude's thumb ran over the wet tip of his cock. "I fucking hear it..."

Rude heard the first finger snap, but didn't flinch. Reno barely noticed. They were moving fast now and Reno was letting out low moans that sounded more like wails, pouring out in waves of pathetic, wanton sound.

"That's right," Rude murmured against Reno's hair. "Tell me what you hear."

He opened his mouth again, no voice for a moment, but then ground out,"...creaks, grinding, screams."

Reno had been caught under the rubble for three days before they found him, just beyond the edge of the sector. It had been the worst three days of Rude's life.

"Don't listen to that," he said, and licked at Reno's neck, then bit at his earlobe. "Just listen to me."

He still had the back of his head pushed against Rude's shoulder, his chest and legs and shoulders stretched as tight as a bowstring against the curve of Rude's body.

"Fuck." The word managed to break through. "Make me come." A whisper: "_Make it end._"

Another snap; the insistent squeeze around the two broken fingers made Rude's vision go blurry. He gave a few more jerks and then felt hot fluid spill over his good hand. The shudders of Reno's body matched the sounds twisting in his throat.

Rude waited for a few moments, then slowly slid his hand up to Reno's chest, palm splayed out against the sweaty skin, and he could feel the hammering there inside. He kept the shaking, exhausted body pressed to him tightly; Reno didn't move, didn't make another sound, barely even exhaled. Rude's grip didn't loosen, and finally Reno slumped, as if every bit of fight had gone out of him, every curse and every desperate word, leaving only silence in its wake. Rude held him there until the angry heartbeat pummeling his ribcage slowed down.

When he felt Reno's breath return, Rude finally let go and slowly sat up. He watched carefully as Reno rolled onto his back, blankly staring at the ceiling as if in another world altogether. He didn't seem to be going anywhere though, so Rude stood up and moved toward the bathroom.

When he sat back down on the edge of the bed and started gingerly taping up his fingers, Reno finally turned his head to look at him. Rude could feel the green eyes evaluating the damage, glance up at Rude's face, then back down to his fingers.

He coughed a little. "Sorry about that."

"It's okay," was Rude's only response. There was the clip of scissors as he finished, and a tentative bend to check the stiffness.

Taped up satisfactorily, he turned to look Reno full in the face where he was still lying, staring up at his partner.

"We have to get some sleep to be ready for tomorrow."

Then before Reno could respond, Rude was on top of him, heavy, hands on his shoulders as if intending to throttle him, their faces inches apart. The fresh tape scratched against Reno's skin as Rude said in a whisper of hot breath, "Don't ever leave me in the dark again."

Anyone else in his position would have been dead by then, spine snapped, jugular dislodged, eye torn out. But since it was Rude, Reno just inhaled sharply and didn't move

"I..." His voice trailed off. He hesitated, then brought his arms around Rude's body and pulled him down closer, arched up and pushed his face against a shoulder.

Rude could tell that Reno was breathing him in right then as he felt Reno's face pressed against his skin, willing the world out. He'd seen him do it before, but only on the bad days.

"It's quiet," Reno said finally, and didn't open his eyes.

Rude laid there for a few minutes against him, and Reno let himself be crushed into the mattress, and they both let the adrenaline settle.

The room was quiet save for the springs in the mattress that creaked to accommodate the shifting of Rude's weight. He turned onto his side, faced Reno, and then said quietly, "Tell me."


End file.
